From A Layman's THEOLOGY:It may be that many Christians cannot get the priorities of prayer straight. For too many, prayer may be the exercise of "final resort" rather than the exercise of "first resort." In terms of the day, the time for prayer is at dawn, not at midnight. Praying at the outset is much better than praying only at the onset. A locomotive engineer friend once had about eleven seconds to "do something" when he realized his train was heading down a steep grade at high speed head-on into derailed cars of another train. After placing the brakes in "emergency," he quickly jumped from his seat on the first engine and, pushing the brakeman before him, raced over the running boards of two engines to the second of his three diesel engines, then pushed the brakeman inside where they and the flagman waited out the crash, which they survived. When asked how he could have reacted so quickly he explained that he had long-since formulated that exact plan in his mind in case he ever faced such a situation. So it is with the Christian. Living in the attitude of "unceasing prayer" provides the formula that will prescribe and inculcate the proper outcome relative to any situation, whether, death, grief, pain, illness, timidity or even great pleasure involving the good things that can sometimes "turn a Christian's head."

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Clark's Corner -

School Transgender Nonsense

There seems no limit to the triviality connected to legislative sessions in Kentucky. The Senate Education Committee has just passed by 8-1 a bill for vote that simply requires public school students to use the toilets and locker-rooms designated for them based on their obvious gender. One wonders how this subject could even come up, much less be taken seriously.

The big thing in political correctness currently is the “transgender issue.” Should a student who has all the attributes of a male be allowed to use the girls' facilities if he announces that he is actually a female dressed as a male? Likewise, the female student who claims transgender-status using the boys' locker-room after a hard day's practice in football or volleyball, respectively.

The main claim of the transgenders has to do with bullying, although such would never occur normally if they just went about their business and said nothing about their gender hangup. Classmates don't know them by their psychological structure but as other-sex only if they're immature (or dumb) enough to announce to one and all that they're “different.” This is probably what has happened.

One would think a sensible parent or other appropriate person would take care of this matter by simply telling the youngster that the world doesn't revolve around him/her, and that 99.99% of female students should not be exposed to a guy doing his thing (such exposure means jail time legally), and vice versa for the girls, just so he/she can prove something, namely that school administrators are mentally-challenged enough to even bother with this problem.

The lone negative Senate vote was cast by Lexington's Senator Reginald Thomas, who said such a law “will stigmatize transgender students.” Just the opposite is true. A boy entering the girls' facilities automatically stigmatizes himself. A girl entering the boys' facility might suffer the stigma attached to just “wanting some,” especially after hours.

Exactly how does a principle determine the truth when a guy with male features and dressed as a male announces himself as transgender and therefore entitled to feminine privileges? Surely just his word is not good enough. Absent a clinical determination (if there is such a thing), the boy is a boy. Even if he shows up in feminine attire he's still masculine, all the artificial processes to make him look girlish (transvestite-mode) notwithstanding.

The same is true with respect to girls. Is a girl's word all that's necessary for special gender-treatment, the privilege of showering with the boys after a phys. ed. class? Or, should she just be told to disrobe before the lady teachers in order to prove her masculinity or lack thereof? Thomas's sense of stigmatization is about as warped as it gets.

Thomas may not have thought of a more serious problem connected with gender-reversal as related to the rest rooms and other gender-related issues, such as eligibility for sports teams. Picture the girl in the boys locker-room shower after a football practice when one of the guys suggests to the other guys having some fun with her, all of them high on Gatorade, with the adrenalin still coursing through their hormones. No one is thinking of consequences (sophomores thinking ahead not likely), so there could be hell to pay all around.

In this era of political correctness, think what would happen if a girl claims to be a boy and presents herself to the football coach. Or, think of the boy who presents himself to the girls' volleyball coach and tries to un-embarrassingly wear the little hot-pants gear designed for voyeurism as much as for any athletic reason.

The financial cost of building new rest/locker-rooms is obvious, not to mention the stigma attached to those who must use unisex facilities, although the transgender-claimers might just be seeking notoriety for the everyday attention and enjoy being watched. Sexual perversions of one kind or another are big right now in the world of political correctness and being thought “different” can be very attractive to an immature student. Is it any wonder that ISIS uses Twitter to recruit teenagers on the basis of be-headings, stoning, amputations, etc.?

I hovered over trains and tracks each day
And watched as shipments came without delay,
The box-cars crammed with flesh and detritus,
The living and the dead bathed in their pus.
Storm troopers strutted, whips so quick to wield,
Their courage proved not on the battlefield,
But as they scourged and laughed with ridicule,
Defenseless masses died beneath their rule.

I watched as families were torn apart,
The children and the aged condemned to start
Their journeys to the gas striped by the lash,
Their bodies then cremated into ash.
The older, stronger ones with arms tattooed
Were listed just as numbers – garish, crude,
And herded toward the work-camps all around
Or into labs, with screams the only sound.

Throughout the deadly compounds rose the stench
As flames from charring bones the flesh would wrench
And then consume the whole in fiery glow
As martinets yet strutted to and fro.
Throughout the work-camps also rose the stench
As work from filthy bodies life would wrench,
The weaker ones went soon beneath the whip,
The road to charnel house their final trip.

I watched starvation take its daily toll –
It was a tool to gain complete control,
The martinets would laugh and lash in glee,
But starving ones came quietly to me.
The ones marked out like guinea pigs or mice
For every sadist’s fancy – volt or slice,
Throughout a threefold hell ere they could die
Like bugs were smashed…their ash then filled the sky.

Ten-thousands met their fate just through disease
While martinets kept strutting in their ease…
No doctors, medicines, no treatment there,
Regaining health was less than even rare.
Through fevered nights, they wept their bitter tears,
Warehoused in stacks like boxes tiers on tiers,
Emaciated bodies broken, bare,
Were sanitized in flames…then filled the air.

Oh yes…I had been there at Anzio,
Throughout the South Pacific…at Iwo,
I gathered in those places friend with foe,
Saw battle-hardened troops their mettle show.
They came to me – to Death – I gathered them,
They came blood-soaked and spewing bloody phlegm,
They came with honor, fighting for a cause,
They faced me, fears in check, without a pause.

But Auschwitz…what an evil travesty
On what Almighty God had meant to be
A thing of beauty…yes…and called mankind
But seen in martinets so ill-defined!
At Auschwitz they became an evil force,
Satanic animals…sadistic…coarse,
Who sent their victims, shorn of dignity,
So inhumanely…yes…they cursed to me.

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For the sake of a bit of nostalgia, important during the current pervasive malaise that is a mark of postmodern politics and the greed of a couple of generations, as well as a bit of humor, why not take a look at a couple of books that remark in a light way some of the events, especially connected to the Democrat party, that took place 2004-2010. They're described in the left column, DEMOCRATS & Other Suspects 2004-08 and Democrat World 2008-10, a sort of recession account treated humorously. John Kerry thought he had a lock on the presidency in 2004, when the Ohio returns shot him down, and Barack Hussein Obama saw his Affordable Care Act—also known as Obamacare, among other appellations—enacted into law, with new costly features of the act becoming known as the days go by, as Speaker Pelosi promised, with the employer mandate already years behind in its implementation by...yep...executive order, so what else is new? It’s all in good fun and represents for one thing that politicians, like all others, have feet made of clay and brains that are sometimes on vacation, if not altogether removed from the planet, the case for some of them.